Top techniques to avoid 'data scraping' from a website database

Question

I am setting up a site using PHP and MySQL that is essentially just a web front-end to an existing database. Understandably my client is very keen to prevent anyone from be

Answer 1

There's no easy solution for this. If the data is available publicly, then it can be scraped. The only thing you can do is make life more difficult for the scraper by making each entry slightly unique by adding/changing the HTML without affecting the layout. This would possibly make it more difficult for someone to harvest the data using regular expressions but it's still not a real solution and I would say that anyone determined enough would find a way to deal with it.

I would suggest telling your client that this is an unachievable task and getting on with the important parts of your work.